TVNewser: Hard to believe 365 days have passed since CNBC mainstay Mark Haines passed away. Former colleagues reflected on their longtime friend.

SocialTimes: Yahoo is giving its visitors a new experience with Axis. The search engine takes you from desktop to tablet.

10,000 Words: Twitter is just short on art for telling a story in 140 characters or less. New Yorker is taking it to the next level, tweeting an entire, 8,500-word short story. That should make for interesting RTs!

For Yahoo, the departures keep coming. Blake Irving, who had come to Yahoo under its former CEO Carol Bartz, is stepping down. This comes mere days after the company gave walking papers to 2,000 staffers. All Things D reports that Irving and Yahoo’s current CEO, Scott Thompson, never saw eye to eye:

Irving had largely opposed the strategy that Thompson has been aiming toward, said sources, and also strongly disagreed with laying off so many employees without a clear plan in place. Many inside and outside Yahoo agree.

He was also apparently concerned about the massive engineering and research talent exodus of late, especially in Yahoo’s vaunted Labs arm, which suffered major cuts in the layoffs.

There is no word on what Irving will do next, though sources told All Things D that he has already had several offers.

Scott Thompson, Yahoo’s relatively new CEO, is cleaning house. The company is laying off a whopping 2,000 staffers in a move that is estimated to save the company about $375 million a year.

According to The Huffington Post, Thompson claimed that the massive layoff was an ”important next step,” toward making Yahoo “better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require.”

More, from Thompson:

We are intensifying our efforts on our core businesses and redeploying resources to our most urgent priorities. Our goal is to get back to our core purpose — putting our users and advertisers first — and we are moving aggressively to achieve that goal.

The New York Times reports today that News Corporation has emerged as one of several major players weighing bids to acquire Yahoo. The other companies being mentioned are Silver Lake Partners, Microsoft and Alibaba, a Chinese Internet venture.

The most aggressive has been Alibaba — its CEO recently said he was “very interested” in Yahoo — but don’t count out News Corp., it has been making moves:

The media conglomerate has contacted Yahoo and several financial firms, including Silver Lake, according to three people with knowledge of the situation who requested anonymity because the talks were private.

The draw of Yahoo isn’t its Internet portion. The company has shares in Alibaba and a Japanese affiliate that could could grab Yahoo about $13 billion total, if sold off. Things get more murky when trying to figure out how much the rest of the company will fetch. As long as this doesn’t have any hints of the Myspace debacle, News Corp. is probably going to stay intrigued.

Yahoo has hired longtime Internet executive Robertson Barrett to run its Yahoo News and Finance sites, Kara Swisher reports for All Things Digital.

Barrett has a long media resume, including senior positions at Tribune Interactive, Time Inc., ABC News, Primedia’s Channel One Interactive, and The Feedroom. Most recently, he served as Chief Strategy Officer of Perfect Market.

At Yahoo, Barrett replaces Mark Walker, who left for Disney a month ago, and Steve Schultz, who left the top Yahoo Finance job last fall.

FishbowlNY recently told you about Mail Online passing The Huffington Post as the most visited newspaper website, and now Poynter has the top U.S. news sites listed. The Yahoo! News Network comes in first with 86,635 unique visits per month, followed by CNN (80,202), MSNBC (54,245), AOL (47,221) and The New York Times (38,060).

As for other New York news sites featured on the list, Fox News comes in eighth place with 27,019 uniques a month, and The Wall Street Journal is way down the list at 15, with 15,541.

It should be noted that these are just composite numbers crunched by Poynter, and not official, but it’s pretty interesting. Oh, and The Huffington Post is actually in sixth place on this list, right behind the Times. Those two brands just can’t seem to stay away from each other, can they?

• FishbowlDC: Nigel Barker is going to discuss his book on Thursday at Eden’s Green Room. He will also reportedly be answering questions about how he can possibly stand working with Tyra Banks.
• WebNewser: Yahoo! has just launched a new celebrity news site, called omg! NOW. That’s a lot! Of exclamation! Points!
• PRNewser: Facebook is remaining silent on its role during the Egyptian protests. We bet the Winklevi would love to comment on it.

As reported in The Wall Street Journal earlier this morning, The Associated Press and Yahoo Inc. may be close to structuring a deal that would have Yahoo putting tighter restrictions on AP content, and possibly even charging users for the ability to read the newswire.

This comes directly at the heels of the revelation that AP content is not being updated on another search engine, Google, despite the fact that the contract between the two media giants isn’t set to expire until the end of the month. The Associated Press may be speeding along with their deal with Yahoo in order to get some of their content searchable again (though the WSJ article mentioned that the AP was still “in negotiations” with Google and Microsoft).

Read More: AP, Yahoo Near Deal on Content Use –Wall Street Journal

Previously: Google Pulls AP Stories From News Page, Everyone Still Wary Of Murdoch’s Bing Deal

Out of all the positions in the newspaper industry to freeze during a recession, it’s sad that the people who write and edit the actual copy are the ones who have to find work in a different field. Meanwhile, advertising and marketing staffs continue to grow in many sectors, because media execs are still looking for ways to market and sell their products during this new digital age.

We can’t blame them: so many advertisers have pulled print ads in 2009 that it seems like it can only go up from here. But in places like Chicago, where The Chicago Tribune has been shattered by bankruptcy and editorial staffers have defected over to a non-profit consortium that’s providing content for The New York Times‘ new Chicago-centric edition, you’d think that the newspapers still in existence would focus more on punching up their copy rather than hiring another marketing person to tell them they need to get on Twitter.

Yet Sun-Times Media has hired Matthew A. Saleski, formerly of Yahoo! and Kraft Foods, to do exactly that. Saleski has already worked a five-year stint at The Tribune Co., which makes him the perfect person to figure out the competition’s plans before they happen. Which, unfortunately in this case, just includes “not folding.”

Full press release below.

Read More: Sun-Times Media Names Marketing VP — E&P

Previously: Tribune Co.’s No Good, Very Bad Week, More Tribune Employees Join Chicago News Cooperative

Read more

Wenda Harris Millard, who joined Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia in the summer of 2007 and became its co-CEO a year later, leaves the tower that proper etiquette built to work as president of Media Link LLC. Her new company specializes in media representation and strategic advising of media outlets.

“I am enormously excited about contributing to the quality counsel and implementation services Media Link provides to its impressive roster of international clients,” Millard, who served as chief sales officer at Yahoo before coming to MSLO, said in a statement. “I am as passionate as I have ever been about the media, marketing and advertising businesses, and I cannot think of a more opportune time or a more well-positioned company than MediaLink with which to apply my skills and knowledge in helping major global companies plan and execute intelligent marketing strategies.”

Her move, however, isn’t all gum drops and chocolate. According to the New York Post, tensions between Millard, the other co-CEO Robin Marino and Martha Stewart drove the former to MediaLink. Last week, Millard’s deputy Jacki Kelley, who came over from Yahoo to serve as MSLO’s executive vice president of media sales, left the company for a position at an advertising agency. Her boss didn’t take much time to follow her out the door.